"Unschooling" is a growing movement in education

I am all in favor of alternative schooling methods for children. My oldest child attends a small private Waldorf school, my middle child is at a public Montessori charter school and my youngest just started at a private Montessori preschool. I believe that mainstream schooling works for some children, but for others it is wonderful that there are so many choices. However, I just became aware of the Unschooling movement. Huh? I knew about homeschooling, but unschooling? It sounds like an oxymoron. But apparently it is quite a growing movement in the country.

Currently it is estimated that anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 children are following this unconventional method of learning. Unlike the home school method of learning, unschooled children follow no set curriculum, rather they learn what they want, when they feel so inclined. This is because the philosophy of the learning method states that humans have an ingrained need to learn and will do so if theft t their own devices.

Okay, I can buy that. But it seems like a fairly large leap of faith. You only have once chance to ensure that your child receives the best education possible. What if your child feels the need to play video games rather than explore the beauties of math? Or what if your kid decided to spend his entire childhood reading only comic books? What then?

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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 2)

I would love this. I'm in 11th grade, and everything I am learning now I have either already learned or will never use again. Yet, there is so much I WANT to learn, but I just don't have time to devote to learning it.

I'm not sure if I would want this for my full 12 years of schooling, or if I would want to do it for a full year, but if they had just one class like this in school I, and a lot of others, would take it.

(I was homeschooled with an unschooling-like philosophy, and plan on doing the same for my children.)

Unschooling, like any educational philosophy, can be abused, but ideally it is not so much letting the child do whatever he wants as letting his interests guide the focus of what you're working on.

So if he wants to read comic books all day, you could use that to encourage him to practice drawing, learn anatomy, the physics of how those superpowers could work, etc. If he's currently obsessed with cars, use that as a springboard for learning how an engine works. With some creativity you can work the educational necessities into just about any interest the child naturally has.

The advantage is that the child retains his love of learning, rather than having it beaten out of him by being forced to learn things he's not interested in.

While I am not unschooling my son yet, this is one option that I am considering. Even with the unschooling approach, there are certain limits. Naturally, video games are not included.

As for comic books, my husband said that they saved his life because it was the ONLY thing he would read when he was younger. He HATED to read. If not for comic books, he would not be able to read. There are certain comic books which are educational and I would definitely encourage my child to read them if s/he won't read anything else. Over time, the child will eventually move on to other books.

The reason the unschooling approach appeals to me is that children are able to learn what they want to learn. For example, if I notice that my child loves history, I would find different books and activities related to history to encourage his/her passion. If the child was in a regular classroom, this passion would be suppressed because the child has to go with whatever the teacher has for the entire class to read or do. There's still a lot that I have to learn before I make a decision what to do with my child's education. I hope people who unschool their children will be commenting on this post so I can learn from them. =)

That is a wonderful story. The best gift you could give a child is to teach them how to learn - and that is what I read in the article about "unschooling". By following the interests of the children and helping them find the information to increase their understanding of the interest you are teaching them how to find information about a subject and to add their own observations. This way they will retain that interest the rest of their life instead of being sick of memorizing things.

As for reading, my father learned how to read via comic books. If the kid has a brain, and I think all our kids do, even comic books can be a leveraged into a desire to read science fiction and onto the classics. I am not so sure about video games though - at least I am not aware of a way to leverage that (guide learning using the games), but I am also unfamiliar with video games.

A very close friend of mine unschooled her 4 children, all born one year apart. They are all profoundly gifted children and she was fearful that any schooling program would not work, so she unschooled them until the youngest was 10. At that point, they all went off to Junior College, where they had to take two full years of remedial classes because they never learned grammar or how to write an essay or how to spell, or pretty much anything other than math and some science. History...nope. Literature...nope.

After she saw how far behind her kids were, and how much they didn't learn, she became the poster mom for the "Don't Unschool" movement. I was considering unschooling my PG son, and she was the deciding factor in chosing a more traditional homeschooling environment for him.

I know quite a few kids that were unschooled, and they have huge gaps in their education. Most of them are very good at some things that interest them, but don't know anything about the rest of the stuff you need to know to succeed in life. I think that's a shame, because with the littlest bit of effort, you can teach your child to write and spell and use grammar correctly, all of which are essential in adulthood.

A child does want to learn. What else does a child do from the moment he's born? The love of learning gets crushed out of children too often by being forced to learn things they're not interested in, and teachers not being able to create an interest in the subject they teach. When small, if you help a child learn to read, not force them to read, that child will read whatever comes along. When I was 3, my big sister came home from school and taught me what she learned. I could read anything before I even got to kindergarten. If there was nothing to read that I liked, I read whatever was available - ketchup labels, cereal boxes -anything. Some video games help a small child to learn elemental math and reading and make it fun. But the fight games and mindless get-through-the-maze type games just turn a kid into a couch potato. My 13-year-old has trouble learning at school. She doesn't move at the pace required in any subject. She is very bright and can learn what she is interested in. She knows more about computers than I do. She has set up her own website and can type almost as fast as I can, (and I do it for a living). She has no interest in science or social studies. She loves language arts. She knows elementary arithmetic and feels she doesn't need algebra. I haven't used algebra since I graduated high school, but haven't needed it either. Why force kids to learn something they have no use for. Teach them instead how to read and how to learn, and then when they find something their interested in, they will be able to learn about it as fast as they want to.Abe Lincoln educated himself with borrowed books. He turned out pretty OK. Same with other famous people. Einstein failed classes - he just wasn't interested in them. But he learned what he needed to know.I say yay! to unschooling.

We've been concidering this for some time. Montessori was/is our first choice but when the time comes we're not sure if we'll be able to afford it. Possibly for one kid but probably not for any subsequent children.

I don't think unschooling is for everyone. I have a friend who "unschools" and personally I think it's an example of unschooling gone wrong!

Unschooling? Excellent, now there's a name for it. I have five children I did it too. One son learned to read through car emblems, we traveled so much. When we baked cookies and doubled the recipe, that was math lesson. Obtaining store refunds, using coupons, asking directions--speech and communications. Now they are all living on their own and have excellent careers. Yeah, they had video games--that progressed to computer skills. Of course we had memberships to the zoo, the science museum and watched a lot of public tv--all activities they continue in adulthood. I am proud of them all and recommend "unschooling."

Well, calling it "unschooling" certainly does color the image of it doesn't it? It seems that something like "anti-format" would better describe it. I can see how this would be the perfect learning environment for certain children ... But like all good things, this seems to have great potential for abuse. I'm interested to see where this is going to go.

My neice and nephew are being unschooled. At 12yo, my neice is way, way ahead of the game in some academic areas and slightly behind in others. They have participated in some state testing in PA to see where deficits may lay, and then found ways to improve those areas. For example, handwriting was an issue, so they got a bit more formal in teaching it. I do see a great amount of work on my SIL's part, both finding materials suitable to their interests and driving them all over to museum classes, music classes etc where classes are often led for homeschoolers. For the two of them, both with aspergers syndrome, this is a perfect way to be schooled. My two and me? Nope.

Like anything else, this is open to the personal interpretation of the people doing it.So sometimes, rarely I think, you will find that it is not a good choice for a family and the kids and more often it is very successful.I used to say that we unschooled but frankly, it is too limiting a word for all that my kids and I do. Mostly we live life everyday, all of it. They are expected to be able to master all the skills that they need to live and function independently as adults and to recognize and achieve their own goals.They are allowed to do it at their own speed and in a way that works for them, which is very different from what, often, can be done in a classroom situation.

My brother-in-law came from a similar program (called "whole language") and had so much trouble with simply reading that he lost much self-esteem, and thus interest in school.

I can see how, in theory, this may work. But ultimately I think a planned curriculum is somewhat necessary to be sure areas get covered and kids get the help they need in areas they find troublesome. I had trouble in multiplication, and if I didn't put some necessary sweat (against my will) into memorization (BORING!) I would have never discovered my interest in algebra/trig later on. Make no mistake, I did NOT want to study multiplication.

From my understanding of what "unschooling" is, I'd pull my kid out of any school that used it.

I wish we had more free time and less homework. I'd try to do more "unschooling" in the afternoon or evening.

There's so much they don't learn in school that we could cover without them even realizing they're learning. By the time they finish with homework we're all too exhausted for anything except food, bath, and bed.

Ok here is my understanding of the difference of home-schooling with a curriculum and “unschooling” with a curriculum you learn math because it is math and here is your math lesson. Sure there is some effort to show how it works with the real world, but in the end you learn math, you learn science, you learn grammar.

Unschooling is very challenging because let’s say your child’s current interest is medieval warfare, you learn math by learning about arrow trajectories, you learn about science through gun powder/greek fire (I’m sure they had one, but my history education is sadly lacking). You learn geography in studying battles. You learn language and grammar by studying the changes between medieval English and Modern English. And you don’t say “Now for your math lesson: how do you calculate the trajectory or an arrow”. You talk about bows, and force, and history, and geography, and trajectories all at the same time.

The key to unschooling is you have to be able to see the interconnectedness of everything. If you are at the zoo watching the animals you have to be able to teach not only about fur and feathers, but say exponential growth, geography, statistics, history, latin, etc etc. I don’t think everyone is up to teaching that way, I do think almost all kids could benefit from learning that way.

I was unschooled, after a disastrous 6th grade year (and stayed on with it until college). It can and does work. As with Montessori, Waldorf, homeschooling, and other "alternative" approaches to childhood education, some students struggle with a paradigm shift when they hit college or the workforce. But generally speaking, all of the unschoolers I've known have found greater happiness sooner in their lives than most of the traditionally schooled people I know. I (and my friends) attribute this to learning how we learn best, and being allowed to explore our true selves earlier than our counterparts.

It's true that unschooling doesn't work for all students, but more children would take to it than detractors presume simply because, as the term implies, the children have to be de-schooled (taken outside the traditional school habits) before they can start their unschooled education. When I first started (after 7 years in public schools), it took me 6 weeks to get to the point where I felt the itch to take an active role in my education. After that, I never looked back.

Like most things, the success of "unschooling" will be highly dependent on the child and parent, their motivation, their sense of balance, their goals.

I do think unschooling is probably more prone than other non-traditional methods to having gaps in education. An adult is expected to have a certain level of knowledge of grammar, math, literacy, problem-solving, ability to write etc. to succeed in the post-secondary and career world. The goal (as far as I can see) needs to be "use the childs interests to build in all the regular lessons", like hiding zuchinni in bread, rather than "let them do whatever they want, whenever they want, and expect it will just all be good."

The potential problem with this method really lies with the teacher/parent, more than anything. If they aren't prepared to extract practical lessons from the childs interest, then the child will not learn a number of probably important things.

I'm baffled, too... I use almost everything I learned in middle/highschool as the basis for what I do now. Math (even calculus) for estimating materials I need to build a deck, chemistry (not quite as much) for cooking, cleaning, gardening etc., history and geography are what allows me to contextualize what I read and hear on the news every day. Literature has given me a far greater understanding of human nature than any experience short of "learning the hard way."

So what, precisely, are our highschoolers learning that isn't useful? Because even if the details aren't, the methodology, the basis, the concepts, learning how to think critically and solve problems are all highly relevant.

I am a public school teacher and I can appreciate the virtues of unschooling. Unfortunately, I have seen a few kids whose parents claim they are being unschooled when in reality they are having no education, no learning. I hope lazy homeschoolers don't give unschooling a bad name.

Please do not confuse "homeschooling" with "unschooling", both are taught at home but have different curriculums and views. I have two sons one in 8th grade the other in 11th grade. I homeschool my 8th grader. He is registered under an umbrella school and I have to send grade/progress reports every semester to them. We have a class schedule Mon-Fri and he is required to study four hours a day. The lesson plans I use have to be approved by the umbrella school he is registered with. I just hate to see those who homeschool get a bad rap. There already seems to be a stigma attached to homeschool famlies. Thanks! Just wanted to add my opinion!